Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 2, 2003

The academic quality and reputation of UC Berkeley's "crown jewel" physics department have declined and need "immediate and significant" action to halt the damage, a confidential report says.

The report was prepared at the university's request by a six-member team of highly regarded outside physicists who visited the department in March.

According to the team's report, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, the department's future is clouded by departures of promising younger faculty, inadequate office and lab space, "the dysfunctional computer system on campus" and other problems.

As a result, the department where much of the atomic age dawned and Nobel laureates once routinely rubbed shoulders, faces "significant decline," "dispirited faculty" and infrastructural "horror stories" that obstruct its investigation of new sciences.

Especially threatened is campus research into sciences that explore the commercially exciting realms of the unimaginably small.

The report said the review team was highly critical of the antiquated lab space used by some research scientists and found that computer support within the physics department "seems to be in an appalling state."

"Horror stories from graduate students, junior faculty, and staff about the state, the integration, and the maintenance of the existing (departmental) plant abound," the report says.

It bluntly warns that the crisis "will have a devastating impact on the Department's ability to recruit or retain the best faculty." It notes that the department has lost five of its young theorists in recent years: four to other institutions and one to another Berkeley department.

Physics department chair Christopher McKee, a theoretical astrophysicist, confirmed the authenticity of the 24-page report and said he largely agreed with its conclusions.

"Some of our outstanding younger faculty have left," McKee acknowledged. "That is a situation which obviously we have to address so that does not continue to occur."

SPACE SHORTAGE

Fixing the department's problems will require, first and foremost, the addition of perhaps 40,000 square feet of space, plus new equipment, at a likely cost of tens of millions of dollars, McKee said.

However, McKee acknowledged that cash is currently very hard to squeeze from the budget-strapped state: "There are almost no public funds. And because of the condition of the stock market, it's very difficult to come up with private funds."

At stake is the fate of perhaps the single most famous academic department in the history of California. Decades ago, its hallways, classrooms and labs -- and its sister physics labs such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory up on "the hill" -- echoed to the sounds of pipe-puffing Robert Oppenheimer as he discussed subatomic physics and Eastern mysticism with fellow intellectuals.

Thanks partly to the charisma of Oppenheimer and physicist E.O. Lawrence, Berkeley became a breeding ground for Nobel laureates.

FACULTY LOSSES, AGED FACILITY

UC Berkeley's golden age for physics ended long ago, though. Now, the department faces a "very serious" situation. It "has lost further ground from recent faculty losses and is housed in inadequate and aged buildings," the report says.

"Faculty morale is low, partly as a result of these circumstances and partly because of insufficient engagement of the campus administration in its fate," the report continues. "Although the Department is still able to attract first-class students and has an able and dedicated staff, this decline in its fortunes will continue unless immediate and significant actions are taken by both the UCB Administration and by the Department."

McKee said he disagreed with the report's insinuation that the administration had been less than sympathetic to the department. In fact, it has been "extremely sympathetic," he said.

In an interview, McKee cited one professor, Seamus Davis, a condensed-matter physicist who left last year for a post at Cornell University. Davis specifically left Berkeley because "the space was inadequate for him to carry out experiments that he wanted to do," McKee said.

McKee noted that adequate space is especially important because modern physics in delving deeper than ever into "nanoscience," the science of the super-small, where lengths are measured in billionths of a meter. At such small scales, the slightest vibrations or electromagnetic interference -- say, from the motor in a nearby elevator -- can mess up an experiment.

The department is housed in aged LeConte Hall, which is undergoing a seismic retrofit for safety purposes. The retrofit is forcing an "imminent space crunch," especially for the department's condensed-matter research group, the report says. Condensed-matter physics -- in which physicists nudge around individual atoms as blithely as Minnesota Fats manipulated billiard balls -- is one of the most exciting branches of physics in the technological and commercial sense.

For the department's condensed-matter scientists, the prolonged space crunch has been "hugely demoralizing," the report notes.

McKee said that the report's recommendations, and possible UC Berkeley responses, would be discussed in a meeting next week with Paul Gray, the campus provost and executive vice chancellor for research.